Jeff Hadfield - Professional Profile

Summary

Jeff started with personal computers in the late seventies, when he learned to program BASIC on an Apple II (not an Apple II Plus, mind you). Since then, he’s learned Pascal, Fortran, COBOL and VB/VB.NET – all of which have been enough to show him that he’s not a born developer, but he can play one on TV, so to speak. (He's not bad at markup (HTML, CSS) but not good at JavaScript.)

Jeff has worked with developers and developer communities for 20 years. He is the former Editorial Director of WordPerfect Magazines (remember macros?). He's also the former Editor in Chief and Publisher of Visual Basic Programmer's Journal, Visual Studio Magazine, Java Pro magazine, Visual C++ Developers Journal, Exchange & Outlook Magazine, Enterprise Architect magazine, and Microsoft Architecture Journal. He also worked on the VBITS/VSLive! conferences and the various related websites for those publications and conferences. He has spoken and presented at many tech and marketing industry conferences and events.

He currently works to help businesses understand and reach developers better as part of Developer Media.

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The Code Project Daily Insider keeps you up to date with what is happening around the industry. From the continue saga of the Big Boys to Scott Guthrie's blog ramblings and Steve Jobs' latest, you will find it here.

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Interesting article that ends with a reminder of developers' importance:Remember “embrace and extend?” That refers to programming, not networking or hardware. What about the famous Steve Ballmer “monkey boy” dance? He was chanting “developers, developers, developers!” not “networking engineers and system administrators!” Let’s get some perspective folks. We’re the programmers. At the end of the day, the entire IT industry must be focused around catering to us, and we ultimately (and hopefully) serve the end user. It’s simple, really — we’re the only ones who are trying to directly meet the end users’ goals. Everything else simply supports that. A PC without software is useless. A network without bits flowing over it is useless. But we can write software for any platform that can communicate over any network and, for a while, we didn’t need networks. It is development in software that drives the deployment of new hardware and new networks, not the availability of enabling new software. The user doesn’t care if you are using a PowerPC or an x86 CPU — they care about running the apps they want. Ditto for networking technologies.

Microsoft’s really big bets are in development tools and not the OS or the hardware.

We're getting ready for TechEd in Orlando. We'll be there the Developers week -- come by and see us in our booth (#1111). We will (hopefully) have some news for you and (also hopefully) some tchotchkes (freebies). (Boy, Firefox spell check did NOT like that word.)

To help get the word out about our two new sites -- java.codeproject.com and lamp.codeproject.com -- we'll be exhibiting and attending JavaOne in San Francisco this week. If you're in town, stop by and say hello!

For at least a few years, I've complained about the word "blog." I understand how it fits a purpose, but it's basically the same thing people have been doing for a long time, made easier. It's sending an email newsletter to friends, it's creating a personal web page using Front Page; it's simply a further democratization of electronic communication tools.